From time to time, seemingly without any reason, the PXE service stops working. The service is still shown as running, but clients are unable to perform network installation etc. A simple restart of the service helps fortunately.

In situations where this happens our service desk get contacted and restarts the PXE service. This works OK, but we are looking for another way to get around doing this manualle. A script running every 10 minutes or so that perform a check on the PXE service by communicating directly with it (performing a command or something) could be a solution, restarting the service if it doesnt get the expected reply. However I feel like doing that is a bit bad way to go about this...

Is there anyone else out there that experience this problem and have found a solution to this?

One cause could be the fact that the PXE Representative changed its IP address.

The PXE Representative software only works on the IP address that is assigned when the service starts. If the IP Address changes, do to an expired DHCP lease, or something like that, and the IP Address changes, then the PXE services won't work until restarted.

Or if you boot a device and the DHCP server fails at first, so you end up with the 169.x.x.x default address windows assigns, and then your DHCP server starts responding and you get an address.

Check this registry key next time a machine fails and see if the IP Addresses listed all match the one assigned to the PXE rep?

HKLM\Software\Intel\PXE\ProxyDHCP

REG_MULTI_SZ Discovery List

If this is the problem, you should probably submit a bug to have the PXE Services detect an IP Address change and restart themselves.

The description for Event ID ( 1 ) in Source ( PxeServices ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information is part of the event: PxeService: Error 0x2740 while binding Socket on Port=4011, IP=0-0-0-0

The first one seems to happen more often than the last. mfc71.dll seems to be a part of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. The last error is a bit interesting though. The system seems to "get over" the first error, while the PxeServices error seems to coincide with when PXE stops working. The error seems to say that the system is unable to setup port 4011 for the PXE service.

FYI, the IP address is static.

The server has a relatively big workload, transfering around 100GB each day during normal operation, so we almost expect some hickups.:-)

Our LANDesk server is running on Windows 2003 Enterprise Edt. I have been to that website you mentioned and checked the IP settings; they all look fine. The service seems to crash especially when there is a high load onto the DHCP server. After what I've seen the PXE part of LANDesk is quite old and perhaps it can not cope with the traffic.:-)

We use a long time on some smaller sites XP clients... on sites which installs a lot of clients at one time, it's better to use a server for PXE only... :-) no other applications with high traffic. I've a lot of problems if DB's (MS SQL or Oracle or MySQL) are installed on PXE server too.

No, we haven't tried running the PXE on another machine. Could try doing that but would require some planning (as I mentioned before this is in a quite big environment). The server should have good capacity though; its a ProLiant DL380 with 2x Xeon 5130 dualcore and 6 gigs of memory on a 2gbit link.